Teaching Philosophy

As an academic coach in my undergraduate studies, I mentored a student by teaching him what are often considered the basic skills to be successful in college - note-taking, studying, test-taking strategies, reading strategies, academic writing skills - to the point where he was comfortable applying those skills on his own. It was my positive experience coaching him that made me interested in teaching. Reflecting on that experience, I’ve identified three traits that I value as an instructor: structure, relevancy, and adaptability.

    To me, structure means that an instructor has laid out clear expectations of what they expect from students, and how the content to be taught is presented during an instruction session. As a student, I look for structure in a well-organized syllabus that contains assignments that have clearly laid out the expectation for the work that I need to do, because this is the structure that the provides the backbone that the instruction will hang on. With that said, it is my goal as an instructor to endeavor to create syllabi and assignments that have clear expectations. This helps students by letting them know what expectations I have for the class and their coursework and allows them to prepare adequately to meet those expectations. As for providing structure during an instruction session, I use cognitive apprenticeship, a constructivist method of teaching, where a master teaches an apprentice a skill by making the thought process behind a skill explicit and allows the apprentice to practice it with immediate feedback from the master.  In library instruction, I have done this through modeling a search strategy to English as Second Language students. I ask them to follow along while I demonstrate how to conduct a database search, then after I have finished modeling the search process for them, the students are given time to immediately put these skills into practice on their own topics. While they practice searching, I go around the room and check in with them individually to give them immediate feedback on their search strategies, and suggesting what they might try differently to yield more results. These exercises uncover and make explicit the structure behind conducting database searches by showing the different steps required to get to a point where they have good keywords to find relevant articles on their topics. It is my hope that by teaching them the structure of the research process, and the specific structure of keyword searching a database, will be a transferable skill that they can use for all their future research.

    Relevancy is another core value that I hold as an instructor. It is important to me that the information I teach is relevant to the learning outcome I am trying to achieve as well as to my student’s lives and needs. For an information literacy session, I want to make sure that my assignments meet an immediate research need, to make sure this happens, I communicate directly with their instructors to learn what the students are researching. Do they have a broad topic that the need to narrow down? Do they need to write a pro and con argument? How many types of each kind of article do they need? This allows me to tailor my instruction directly to their current information needs. Then once the students arrive at their session, I teach them how to evaluate relevancy for their chosen topic. How do the articles they are looking at connecting to the topic they have selected? I often ask them to evaluate whether the article’s title seems to connect to their topic, or if the abstract makes it clear if their topic is covered in the article. I also explain that every article does not have to be a perfect match to be relevant to the argument they are building. By tuning the materials and information presented directly into their information needs students are more likely to use and recall the information they received in the future.

In addition to structure and relevancy, I value adaptability as an integral part of my teaching philosophy.  To me, adaptability means being able to adapt to the needs of your students whether it is incorporating different learning styles into your lessons, re-assessing deadlines, re-assessing your style of instruction, or recovering from malfunctioning technology during a session. When demonstrating search strategies to students, I often show keyword searches. One way, I try to do this in information literacy sessions is by demonstrating keyword searches. I start with a general search with basic keywords and then teach them how to generate better keywords to find articles by showing them how they can use the subject terms in the database to reframe their search using the language of the database. I also suggest that they think about synonyms as another way to generate more keywords. These give them strategies to adapt their searches to get relevant results for their research. My hope is that the ability to adapt searches will transfer over into the student’s other skills as they work hard at university and beyond into their lives.

     In summary, I believe that it is important to try to meet the needs of all learners in the classroom and that is possible to do so by adhering to the core values that I have identified in this teaching philosophy.